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Doré, Gustave (1832–83), French illustrator, painter, and sculptor, whose fame grew world‐wide with the publication of his engravings in Dante's Inferno (1861). Doré was a skilled draughtsman (drawing directly onto woodblocks), theatrical, poetic, versatile, and incredibly prolific. He was often criticized for his fecundity and for the rapidity of his work, having produced more than 8, 000 wood engravings, 1, 000 lithographs, 400 oil paintings, and 30 works of sculpture. Anecdotes told frequently about Doré relate how he began to draw when about 4, that he always had a pencil in hand, and that he preferred his pencils sharpened at both ends. With little formal training, Doré began as a young comic‐strip artist, a boy genius, at the age of 15 illustrating a parody of Greek mythology, Les Travaux d'Hercule (Labours of Hercules, 1847), and evolved into a literary artist illustrating the works of Rabelais, Balzac, Milton, Chateaubriand, Byron, Hugo, Shakespeare, and Tennyson. Doré elevated illustration/wood engraving to the level of fine art. Doré's illustrations in Balzac's Contes Drolatiques (Droll Stories, 1855) are often regarded as transitional, moving him towards a more serious or higher stage of art, to literary folios, to painting, to sculpture, to the English, and to religious art. An immensely popular Doré folio, Contes de fées (Perrault's Fairy Tales) found its way to a first English translation (The Fairy Realm, 1865) in verse by Tom Hood the Younger. Nine tales were included: ‘Hop‐o'‐my‐Thumb’ (‘Little Tom Thumb’), ‘Sleeping Beauty in the Wood’, ‘Donkey‐Skin’, ‘Puss‐in‐Boots’, ‘Bluebeard’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘Cinderella’, ‘The Fair’ (‘The Fairies’), and ‘Ricky of the Tuft’. His illustrations of the Perrault fairy tales are generally considered to be classics, and he set a standard of fairy‐tale illustration that few artists have met even today. The first Doré book to be translated into English was Le Chevalier Jaufré (Jaufry the Knight, 1856), a romance of chivalry written by Jean‐Bernard Lafon (pseudonym, Mary Lafon). Contemporary criticism of Doré's work was mixed; some critics denounced him for his inability to paint as a painter would; others for the horror, lewdness, and gloom they saw in his engravings. Most seemed to acknowledge that his art was powerful and highly imaginative.

Bibliography

• Doré Gallery: Illustrated Catalogue (1974).
• Jerrold, Blanchard, The Life of Gustave Doré (1891).
• Malan, Dan, Gustave Doré: Adrift on Dreams of Splendor (1995).
• ——Gustave Doré: A Biography (1996).
• Richardson, Joanna, Gustave Doré: A Biography (1980).

— Sharon Scapple

Doré, Gustave (1832-83). A precocious, versatile, and productive artist, Doré now owes his reputation mainly to the illustrations he produced for more than 200 books. Entirely self-taught, he was already well known for his caricatures when, in the early 1850s, he discovered in literary texts a richer terrain for his unconstrained imagination. His illustrations of Rabelais (1854) enjoyed enormous success and were followed by those of Balzac, Perrault, Cervantes, Chateaubriand, Milton, Hugo, Tennyson, Dante, La Fontaine, the Bible, and numerous lesser-known works. His detailed, energetic images illustrate the fantastic and obsessional in Romanticism's analysis of the anguish, cruelty, and mystery of the human condition, and encompass the range of complex relationships between word and image in the 19th c.

[James Kearns]

(güstäv' dôrā') , 1832–83, French illustrator, engraver, painter, and sculptor. He is best known for his highly imaginative and dramatic illustrations. At first he did his own engraving on wood, but as his success grew, his later work was done in collaboration with numerous engravers. His lively illustrations for some 120 books, including Paradise Lost, the Divine Comedy (1861), Don Quixote (1862), the Bible (1866), Balzac's Droll Tales, the works of Rabelais, the Fables of La Fontaine, and other classics, are still admired. He particularly excelled in weird, fantastic scenes. Less popular today are his works in painting and sculpture.

Bibliography

See study by N. Gosling (1974).

French artist best known for his imaginative drawings and lithographs in editions of Balzac's Droll Stories (1856) and Cervantes's Don Quixote (1863).